A couple embraces with each other near the road above the shrunken Dead Sea, on Dec. 28, 2013. Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian National Authority signed on Dec. 9, 2013, a "landmark" agreement in the World Bank headquarters in Washington D.C., on the construction of a pipeline to carry water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea lies between Israel and Jordan, and in the last decades it has considerably shrunken because of excessive industrial use, mainly by mineral-production factories.

src:IANS